Guilt helps enhance feelings of enjoyment, study says

Misty Harris, Postmedia News05.22.2012

"Oftentimes, we enjoy something indulgent such as a chocolate cake and feel guilty at the same time. As these occurrences repeat themselves, our minds form a connection between the two," says Eunice Kim, a post-doctoral fellow at the Rotman School of Management.

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It’s not your imagination. Researchers say cupcakes really do taste better when you’re on a diet.

Though the idea of guilty pleasures is widely acknowledged, with indulgent activities inducing shame, scientists now find it works in the opposite direction, too. That is, feeling even a little bit guilty has the power to enhance the pleasure we derive from indulgence.

The study, soon to appear in The Journal of Marketing Research, cites implications for everything from marketing campaigns to prevention programs. For instance, while it may improve the consumer’s experience to provoke guilt in a chocolate ad, doing so in a prevention campaign could cause substance abusers to gain even greater enjoyment from using.

“Guilt can increase self-control, in that it decreases your odds of choosing to indulge,” says lead author Kelly Goldsmith. “But when you’re actually engaged in the indulgent experience, guilt increases enjoyment.”

This difference sets up an interesting dilemma for policymakers and advertisers alike.

To wit, activating guilt in an anti-smoking campaign can help ensure non-smokers don’t start up, but current smokers — those whose choice to indulge has already been made — could see their smoking pleasure enhanced. Similarly, stripping ice cream of its guilt by emphasizing that a portion of profits go to charity can encourage sales, but it can also diminish the joy consumers experience from eating it.

“There’s definitely a place for paternalistic interventions that encourage people to ‘do the right thing,’” says Goldsmith, assistant professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Illinois. “But there’s also nothing wrong with using tactics to help people enjoy something more.”

Across numerous experiments with nearly 900 people, the study authors found that inducing even mild levels of guilt was consistently linked to increased pleasure — and by substantial margins — in such hedonic (enjoyable) consumption experiences as eating chocolate, viewing a video of a baby otter at play, and cruising a dating site.

The University of Toronto’s Eunice Kim, who co-authored the study, says the findings suggest that marketers of indulgent products or lowbrow programs “shouldn’t be afraid to incorporate, or even highlight, the guilty aspects” of their wares. She credits the effect to the learned cognitive association between guilt and pleasure.

“Oftentimes, we enjoy something indulgent such as a chocolate cake and feel guilty at the same time. As these occurrences repeat themselves, our minds form a connection between the two,” says Kim, a post-doctoral fellow at the Rotman School of Management. “The association between guilt and pleasure can also be attributed to repeated exposure to external stimuli, such as media and advertising where various products are characterized as guilty pleasures.”

This helps explain why mundane, utilitarian consumption experiences, which lack the benefit of these associations — watching a dry web tutorial, for example — proved immune to the effect in this study. There are some things, it seems, that no amount of psychological manipulation can make pleasurable.

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Guilt helps enhance feelings of enjoyment, study says

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